(27-01-2013 06:23 AM)Hafnof Wrote: So; "I'm not a crazy person. I'm a prophet"? Or "I'm not a crazy person, I'm the next stage in human evolution and have an extra sensory perception"?

"I'm not a crazy person, I'm a sane person with a slightly anomalous sensory gating." I pay the price of clumsiness and distraction, but I might help answer the question what reality is our brain hiding from us.

The brain censors more than 99% of the perceived sensoric reality and focuses our perception according to an arbitrary, outdated criteria, that is avoiding the big cats and hunting prey. Then I get born with a brain that fails to do the censorship properly among a few other things, so I get a little impression of what the brain hides in most people to make us all neat and well-functioning. Of course, during the good old times I'd be the first to be caught by a sabertooth tiger. It's not a next stage in evolution, it's a lesson. As long as people's thalamus is censoring our senses properly as the mother evolution commands, it will keep us in ignorance. We could disrupt it with drugs, but drugs are useless, they allow our internal imaginings to contaminate the perception, this is not what we need.

It remains yet to be seen what kind of a lesson. Medical, scientific, cultural, or paradigm-changing? I doubt the latter, the paradigm is quite rigid today.

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.

So what? It's a conversation. Nobody has any evidence at the table yet. No point in getting offended when someone's laughing. Nobody will be open-minded here, including myself, until I get some evidence. At most we can talk some possibilities, but that's optional.

I laughed because you are making as case, but did not seem to specify anything about it, for example, what exactly our brains are supposedly hiding from us.

Also, assuming simply because you are having a conversation, nobodies mind will change or that they are all closed, is simply a silly position. Strictly speaking, there is no difference between a conversation and a discussion (You seemed to force a schism between the two in an earlier post), both are the exchange of ideas though words, possibilities or solid facts, makes no difference. One just seems more casual than the other, so there is no reason why a person should not have an open mind in a conversation, when they might have one everywhere else.

Nor have you seemed to bring evidence supporting your.. position.. so it hardly seems fair to assume that evidence must be provided to you without your doing the same, in order to start being open minded.

Frankly, I think you need some work phrasing things, but don't we all.

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.

(27-01-2013 08:19 AM)Free Thought Wrote: I laughed because you are making as case, but did not seem to specify anything about it, for example, what exactly our brains are supposedly hiding from us.

Also, assuming simply because you are having a conversation, nobodies mind will change or that they are all closed, is simply a silly position. Strictly speaking, there is no difference between a conversation and a discussion (You seemed to force a schism between the two in an earlier post), both are the exchange of ideas though words, possibilities or solid facts, makes no difference. One just seems more casual than the other, so there is no reason why a person should not have an open mind in a conversation, when they might have one everywhere else.

Nor have you seemed to bring evidence supporting your.. position.. so it hardly seems fair to assume that evidence must be provided to you without your doing the same, in order to start being open minded.

Frankly, I think you need some work phrasing things, but don't we all.

Sure, I figure out how to express things better as I go along. It takes time and learning.

What are our brains hiding from us? Almost everything. Ever heard the metaphor of cosmic burka? I think Richard Dawkins uses it to describe how our eyes see only a narrow band of visible light. If it was made into a centimeters wide gap for eyes in a burka, then this burka would stretch whole kilometers up and down, for all the equally large bands of frequencies that we don't see. Medically speaking, sensory gating is a real thing, it allows us to function without sensory overload. Those with afflicted sensory gating (like me) are prone to sensory overload. IIRC, the exact number was 99.96% of data received by the brain do not make it into our consciousness.
But what specifically does the brain hide? Look at my picture. I'd say it's the awareness of the fields, conduits and vortexes that some cultures called subtle bodies, chakras and nadis. Because this is what I feel I have and it matches the Indian and Chinese sources. That's what my senses tell me, it wasn't my idea. So the question is, how much of the input I have is fabricated by some subconscious beliefs and how much is simply a hole in hippocampus.

What do you mean by exchange of ideas?
I'd say conversation is merely a presentation of ideas, no exchange. We have to adjust our expectations. If there's no common ground, like an objective evidence, all we can check is if the other guy makes an error in logic, but we can't check his premises. Philosophy is at the beginning of everything. If neglect the philosophic groundwork, we can go forward in whatever we do, but we'll choose a wrong way and realize the failure only when it's too late.

I'd say people can discuss because they have a common ground. If they have a common ground, they can influence each other's reality. For example, they have objective evidence and they're rational, which means they obey the evidence. So they can trump each other by presenting the evidence. Or they argue something logical, they fully share their premises and so they can refute each other's flaws in interpreting these shared premises.

Which is why discussing afterlife or ESP is rather pointless, these are very subjective experiences, they don't have much shared common ground. We can of course post links to NDE studies and express our disbelief, but these are rather self-evident things.

(27-01-2013 08:19 AM)Free Thought Wrote: I laughed because you are making as case, but did not seem to specify anything about it, for example, what exactly our brains are supposedly hiding from us.

Also, assuming simply because you are having a conversation, nobodies mind will change or that they are all closed, is simply a silly position. Strictly speaking, there is no difference between a conversation and a discussion (You seemed to force a schism between the two in an earlier post), both are the exchange of ideas though words, possibilities or solid facts, makes no difference. One just seems more casual than the other, so there is no reason why a person should not have an open mind in a conversation, when they might have one everywhere else.

Nor have you seemed to bring evidence supporting your.. position.. so it hardly seems fair to assume that evidence must be provided to you without your doing the same, in order to start being open minded.

Frankly, I think you need some work phrasing things, but don't we all.

Sure, I figure out how to express things better as I go along. It takes time and learning.

What are our brains hiding from us? Almost everything. Ever heard the metaphor of cosmic burka? I think Richard Dawkins uses it to describe how our eyes see only a narrow band of visible light. If it was made into a centimeters wide gap for eyes in a burka, then this burka would stretch whole kilometers up and down, for all the equally large bands of frequencies that we don't see. Medically speaking, sensory gating is a real thing, it allows us to function without sensory overload. Those with afflicted sensory gating (like me) are prone to sensory overload. IIRC, the exact number was 99.96% of data received by the brain do not make it into our consciousness.
But what specifically does the brain hide? Look at my picture. I'd say it's the awareness of the fields, conduits and vortexes that some cultures called subtle bodies, chakras and nadis. Because this is what I feel I have and it matches the Indian and Chinese sources. That's what my senses tell me, it wasn't my idea. So the question is, how much of the input I have is fabricated by some subconscious beliefs and how much is simply a hole in hippocampus.

What do you mean by exchange of ideas?
I'd say conversation is merely a presentation of ideas, no exchange. We have to adjust our expectations. If there's no common ground, like an objective evidence, all we can check is if the other guy makes an error in logic, but we can't check his premises. Philosophy is at the beginning of everything. If neglect the philosophic groundwork, we can go forward in whatever we do, but we'll choose a wrong way and realize the failure only when it's too late.

I'd say people can discuss because they have a common ground. If they have a common ground, they can influence each other's reality. For example, they have objective evidence and they're rational, which means they obey the evidence. So they can trump each other by presenting the evidence. Or they argue something logical, they fully share their premises and so they can refute each other's flaws in interpreting these shared premises.

Which is why discussing afterlife or ESP is rather pointless, these are very subjective experiences, they don't have much shared common ground. We can of course post links to NDE studies and express our disbelief, but these are rather self-evident things.

The evidence that you are receiving input that others are not is zero, nil, nada. The evidence that your brain is generating it non-zero; you are already aware that your sensory interpretation system is compromised in other ways.

Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.

(27-01-2013 09:45 AM)Chas Wrote: The evidence that you are receiving input that others are not is zero, nil, nada. The evidence that your brain is generating it non-zero; you are already aware that your sensory interpretation system is compromised in other ways.

Strictly speaking, your evidence for both is zero. You simply read things on the net about a guy you never saw. You consider one possibility more likely and you're willing to believe me on what you choose. Fortunately, there is a common ground here, so we can argue. There are two ways that a sensory interpretation system can be compromised.
- sensory integration (receiving input that others are not)
- sensory fabrication (fabricating input that others are not)

Let's take an example of sensory fabrication. When a person takes a hallucinogenic drug, the experiences and hallucinations witnessed vary from trip to trip, from person to person, even from moment to moment. The drug simply breaks down the barrier between creative areas of the brain and receptive areas of the brain. This is a very serious condition, it often severely affects the person's ability to function in daily life, resulting in hallucinations, paranoia, disorientation, hospitalization and institutionalization...

Sensory integration is something fundamentally different. The hippocampus is a highway processing millions of bits per second. Only a few dozen or so of them per second are directed into our conscious perception areas, where they can be, for example, stored in memory. This is important, otherwise we'd end up like some people, who remember exactly every day of their life in detail. However, every single bit on the hippocampus is a piece of reality. It's as close to reality as we can get.
Hippocampus makes sure that we get only as much reality as we can consciously handle. But what if this hippocampus has a few faulty signs or lights? What if one road, the road of touch sense, gets more traffic than in normal people? What if it gets not only more traffic, but a traffic from a lane that in most people is never conscious?

In autism spectrum disorders, which is something you hopefully believe me, the problems with sensory integration are common, they're almost a necessary criterion for diagnosis. There is little tendency fabrication, quite opposite, Aspies are extremely non-fabricating people, extremely concrete, literal, bluntly honest, obsessed with precise, detailed descriptions. To accuse me of making up things is quite absurd.
However, such parents will tell you how their children absolutely can't stand certain special sensory input, because it comes in too strong. Some absolutely hate certain textures of food or clothes, some consider unbearable the feeling of water falling on the scalp, so they avoid showering, etc. There is no rule in this, that disorder of hippocampus is totally individual. For example, I absolutely can't stand materials like velvet. I can't even think of touching it. And the anomalous feeling of esoteric things I have is actually very fine, very subtle, very... velvety. If I am over-sensitive to such a feeling, if I get more sensory signal of this kind, then a real velvet is a torture to me. It's really an interesting coincidence.

So basically, Chas, you can't decide whether one receives input or makes it up. This is classified in the diagnostic statistical manual and be assured, these two don't go together on autism spectrum. They might go together in synaesthesia and perhaps schizophrenia, but these conditions are easily disproven.

Another interesting thing, there really is something with my touch sense integration. When I smoked cannabis, it made this perception much stronger, even painful. At the same time, it changed my normal sensitivity. The whole body became so sensitive, that I felt clothes into detail. To be inside clothes was a feeling like being naked in a bulky space suit. It wasn't unpleasant, but now it makes sense how some autistic children like to throw clothes away and run around in underwear (or without) - the texture of cloth is just too rough for them. Another piece of puzzle for the doctor. That's why I don't smoke pot, it does things to me I don't like and that it doesn't do to other people.

(27-01-2013 08:58 AM)Luminon Wrote: Sure, I figure out how to express things better as I go along. It takes time and learning.

What are our brains hiding from us? Almost everything. Ever heard the metaphor of cosmic burka? I think Richard Dawkins uses it to describe how our eyes see only a narrow band of visible light. If it was made into a centimeters wide gap for eyes in a burka, then this burka would stretch whole kilometers up and down, for all the equally large bands of frequencies that we don't see. Medically speaking, sensory gating is a real thing, it allows us to function without sensory overload. Those with afflicted sensory gating (like me) are prone to sensory overload. IIRC, the exact number was 99.96% of data received by the brain do not make it into our consciousness.
But what specifically does the brain hide? Look at my picture. I'd say it's the awareness of the fields, conduits and vortexes that some cultures called subtle bodies, chakras and nadis. Because this is what I feel I have and it matches the Indian and Chinese sources. That's what my senses tell me, it wasn't my idea. So the question is, how much of the input I have is fabricated by some subconscious beliefs and how much is simply a hole in hippocampus.

What do you mean by exchange of ideas?
I'd say conversation is merely a presentation of ideas, no exchange. We have to adjust our expectations. If there's no common ground, like an objective evidence, all we can check is if the other guy makes an error in logic, but we can't check his premises. Philosophy is at the beginning of everything. If neglect the philosophic groundwork, we can go forward in whatever we do, but we'll choose a wrong way and realize the failure only when it's too late.

I'd say people can discuss because they have a common ground. If they have a common ground, they can influence each other's reality. For example, they have objective evidence and they're rational, which means they obey the evidence. So they can trump each other by presenting the evidence. Or they argue something logical, they fully share their premises and so they can refute each other's flaws in interpreting these shared premises.

Which is why discussing afterlife or ESP is rather pointless, these are very subjective experiences, they don't have much shared common ground. We can of course post links to NDE studies and express our disbelief, but these are rather self-evident things.

Ourbrains aren't hiding almost everything from us, I have heard of Dawkins' Cosmic Burka before. If I remember correctly, he used it to describe limiting factors within the human body which affect perceptions, and related it against our "perfect design" for instance, the eye, if memory does indeed serve me correctly. It is not that our brains hide things like higher or lower light frequencies, the brain simply cannot receive them as our eyes are too limited to register them, it is not hiding it at all. However, we can build things which allow us to "see" them as waves, radiation or other things, so we can know they exist. Iam also familiar with the cocktail party effect and it's ilk. Our brain does not filter things out entirely, it just lowers the 'volume' on things which to not require immediate attention. However this does not include things that the human body cannot physically register, such as too high or low pitch noises. But again, we can make things to register them and allow our observation.
I find it amusing that you bring up your apparent awareness of fields, when recently, you seemed to lack an understanding of how electromagnetic fields work. If a thing like chakra existed, we would have been able to detect it by now as they are typically described: Ie an energy. It could be argued that the electrical energy created within the brain could be a chakra, however, we know the electro-chemical energy made in our Thinkin' Sponges is certainly not of a supernatural source, nor is it special, so putting forward that sort of idea, if you were planning on doing so, is pretty pointless. It is more than likely that your mind concocted this supposed awareness of fields, to what purpose, I cannot speculate, however the brain does a habit of creating a bubble for itself to protect it in a similar manner; that which conforms comes in, but detractions stay out.

By the "exchange of ideas", it is very obvious what I mean; whether through discussion or conversation, alternate ideas are presented. Regardless of how determined you are to pigheadedly ignore points brought up by others in the conversation, your brain will still receive the messages and be churning over them, just as it is churning over the body language and vocal tones of the person, looking for signs of anything from them normally.We can check almost everything in a conversation, at least so long as it is in a format like this: purely text with no response times, in a normal (face to face) conversation, that might not hold so true. However, exactly the same can be said for a discussion: There is no major difference between the two, the words, are interchangeable. We can check the premise of an argument, by simply asking "What is your reason for X", "What lead you to your conclusion", or by examining the argument laid before us, and reversing Modus Ponens: If this if their B, what is their A. (If this is their conclusion/result, what is their premise), granted that is simply guessing all gussyied up, but it is directed somewhat, as opposed to the random nature of a guess normally.Philosophy can only go so far, as such, I disagree that it is the beginning of everything, which is why I am prone to making the disparaging comment "It's all philoso-bull anyway", in a society and age, where information that the philosophers of ancient Greece would be having wet-dreams about, if only they could have imagined it, is accessible speculating a philosophical "Why" is relatively unimportant. We can be sure of the physical "Why" (Why something happened, I.E, the physical cause which resulted in "it", whatever it may be) with most things now. Philosophy might maintain the air of being involved in all things, but that is simply a human made illusion, similar to 2+2=4 being an assessment of an A Priori truth, rather than evidenced fact. People have attached all kinds of philosophy to all manner of things, which existed long before the words of philosophy ever did.

Again, you are creating a schism between discussion and conversation, the two are more or less interchangeable. If you wish to present an argument, you should present your premise at the beginning, you'd hardly write a report without an introduction, no?

Even if you feel discussing ESP or the afterlife is pointless, it can be done, even without evidence, you can argue logic and reasoning behind a set of statements as usually, people will defend their logic; think of it as an anti-non sequitur, if your opponent starts with a solid premise but has a false conclusion, or countering the false premise if theirs was faulty to begin with, rather than attacking an unassailable position in the first place. You could also argue from a lack of evidence; The less evidence for a belief, the less justified it is, if there is none, it is not justified. That should force your opponent into producing some form of evidence to attack.

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.

Quote:It's the statistics.
If you line up 10 schizophrenics, their hallucinations will be all different. Let's say
- they will all see a different flying character and hear it saying different things.
- Probably, their hallucination will not be same for all the time, because the levels of chemicals in brain change.
- they weren't born with it, it manifested at random time somewhere around their adulthood. It's random.

My case is different, it's not random, it's permanent, inborn and there is too few objective data to tell what it is. For all practical purposes, it's an extension of the touch sense, it gives me reliable readings that don't change with my moods, etc. It seems useful to me, but nobody can tell yet if it's useful for someone else or the science as a whole. That remains to be seen.

Ok, then where are the thousands of people who have the exact same perceptive anomaly that you are claiming? By your own account, that's what would make it real and valid.

Also, there are children who are schizophrenic. I don't know when the time is they diagnose, but people who will later be diagnosed may show the exact same symptoms in childhood as in adulthood. And certainly there are children with hallucinations, so I'm not sure the idea of hallucinations only manifesting in adulthood is valid.

As for the hallucinations changing according to chemicals in the brain, according to what I've read, it's more that sometimes they are "normal" and without hallucinations, and then other times they are "sick(er)" and having hallucinations. I don't know the statistics, but I don't think it's uncommon for the same hallucination to keep happening for a damn long time.